Waterfront Retirement Communities staff subjected to ID theft

A thief broke into a locked vehicle and grabbed valuables, including a laptop belonging to the provider of retirement living facilities across the country.

The data stored on the machine included the name, address, telephone number, email address, date of birth and Social Security number of Waterfront employees.

The laptop was password protected, according to a July 3 notification letter.

“We have been advised by authorities knowledgeable in this area that the thief was likely interested only in stealing the hardware and will be unable and/or uninterested in accessing the information on the hard-drive,” the company states in the letter.

CSO cast doubt on Waterfront’s assurances the crook would ignore the personal information and be incapable of accessing it.

“Um, what? Beyond relying on Occam’s razor, I’m curious as to how they could say that with a straight face,” CSO writes. After reading Waterfront’s note about password protection, “at this point my head exploded. This is doing a disservice to their customers by giving them a false sense of security . . . A password is of little benefit if a bad actor has physical access to the system. Encrypt your laptops.”